Upcoming Brewmaster Rotation Changes

Brewmasters have experienced next to no change in the last few weeks, even though we still have some broken systems and our rotation felt oddly…rotational (as opposed to how I think active mitigation is supposed to work, where we use different skills depending on the situation and not just because it’s available and we sort of have to).

However, it seems we won’t be stuck in this rut anymore. Several significant changes are in the works, though we don’t know when we will be able to test them. (I hope it’s soon, and I hope a fix for Keg Smash damage is coming down the tubes as well.)

Mister Ghostcrawler kindly posted the impending changes. Here’s the big block of text, but I will look into each item one at a time.

The basic idea is that you should care about converting energy to chi, then converting that chi primarily into Shuffle and Purifying Brew. In most cases, we expect it to be optimal to mix those two abilities, not just always prioritize one over the other. Additionally, Guard should almost always be worth using. The next build you get should have a fairly stable version of Brewmaster mitigation, which includes the following changes to Brewmasters:

— Added 5% Parry to Swift Reflexes.
— Ox Stance now reduces damage taken by 25% (up from 20%), and health by 15% (down from 30%).
— Shuffle now increases Parry by 20%, down from 30%.
— Mastery now increases Stagger by 0.3% per point, down from 0.5%, and no longer increases Parry chance.
— Brewing: Elusive Brew – New passive for Brewmasters which gives you charges of Elusive Brew when you get auto attack critical strikes: You get up to 2 charges per crit, based on weapon speed. For 2Hs, you get an average of Speed/1.8 charges. For 1Hs, you get an average of speed/2.6 charges. Max stack size of 15. (Using unusually slow weapons, you can actually get 3 sometimes, but we’re ignoring that for the tooltip.)
— For example, with a 3.2 speed 2H, you get an average of 1.778 charges per crit (77.8% of the time you get 2, otherwise 1).
— Elusive Brew (the ability) consumes those charges to give you 30% dodge for 1sec per charge.

Passive Survival Changes

— Added 5% Parry to Swift Reflexes.
— Ox Stance now reduces damage taken by 25% (up from 20%), and health by 15% (down from 30%).
— Shuffle now increases Parry by 20%, down from 30%.

All three of these modifications are targeted toward this problem: monks are incredibly squishy without their active mitigation, and were too reliant on Shuffle to survive even moderate damage. Hitting Blackout Kick should be important, but it was too important in the scheme of things and inexperienced players suffered while playing monks as opposed to other tanking classes.

So what did Blizzard do to fix this? They moved some survival out of Shuffle / Blackout Kick and into our passive bonuses. Swift_Reflexes, which is our passive that ties damage to parry, will give us more parry to begin with, and our tanking stance will provide even more damage reduction. Once these changes take place, we should avoid more damage at the beginning of a fight and during low resource periods, though our active mitigation won’t pack quite the same punch.

I’m going to miss that giant health pool, but frankly, it was too strong compared to other tanks. Hitting Blackout Kick will still be important, but you shouldn’t be quite so bad at tanking at the beginning of a pull.

Now this also leads into the next change…

Nerfing Mastery

Mastery now increases Stagger by 0.3% per point, down from 0.5%, and no longer increases Parry chance.

This is a pretty huge nerf, and again likely related to moving some of our active mitigation into passive. The brewmaster mastery was incredibly strong, given that it both increased passive damage reduction (through Stagger) and increased parry. It’s been tuned down, and we’ve been compensated by that extra 5% damage reduction from Ox Stance.

With this change, we’re back to getting no parry from our gear, which is a little worrisome. We can always reforge, but I still have a feeling that the near-guaranteed damage reduction of mastery will out perform the dice roll of parry. It could very well be our second reforging choice, however.

New Active Mitigation: Elusive Brew

— Brewing: Elusive Brew – New passive for Brewmasters which gives you charges of Elusive Brew when you get auto attack critical strikes: You get up to 2 charges per crit, based on weapon speed. For 2Hs, you get an average of Speed/1.8 charges. For 1Hs, you get an average of speed/2.6 charges. Max stack size of 15. (Using unusually slow weapons, you can actually get 3 sometimes, but we’re ignoring that for the tooltip.)
— For example, with a 3.2 speed 2H, you get an average of 1.778 charges per crit (77.8% of the time you get 2, otherwise 1).
— Elusive Brew (the ability) consumes those charges to give you 30% dodge for 1sec per charge.

This change fixes four problems:

Elusive Brew as a clickable mini-cooldown was incredibly boring and encouraged macroing simply because it was so lackluster,

Brewmasters had no defensive scaling from crit, which is all over our leather gear,

Now what exactly does this thing do? In layman’s terms, you gain a third resource, Elusive Brew charges, whenever you critically hit with an auto-attack. You get an average of two per crit. Now when you use the skill Elusive Brew, you consume those charges and increase your chance to dodge by 30%. The duration of the dodge buff is increased depending on how many stacks you consume. So if you crit three times, you’ll gain about six charges of Elusive Brew, and you can consume those charges for a six second dodge buff.

What’s cool about this resource is that it is entirely independent of energy and chi generation. This way you can save Elusive Brew for a rainy day. In heroics I’ve run into a few situations where I have no energy and not enough chi but I need to increase my defenses, and this ability will be usable in such a situation.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, the biggest change is Elusive Brew. Our rotation (i.e. generate chi then spend it on Blackout Kick or Purifying Brew) will not change much, we just get some extra whipped cream on top, in the form of dodging and scaling with crit.

I’m not going to lie, managing Shuffle duration plus your Stagger intensity plus your Elusive Brew stacks and duration plus mini-cooldowns like Guard and heals like Zen Sphere sounds very complicated. Looks like I can’t complain about a low skill cap on tanking this expansion! My Weak Auras will be the most extreme you’ve ever seen.

My hunch is that the stat priority will morph into something like this:

Mastery

Crit

Parry = Dodge (though we’ll almost always be going with parry because we have less of it)

Expertise

Hit

Haste

I’m definitely excited for these updates, and I can’t wait to hop ingame and learn them (if Blizz doesn’t take an eternity to release it).